Geometry of Love

Album review

It was the early 2000 and downtempo and acid jazz were being smothered by the rise of French Touch house. But they found an escape route when lounge music flared into life, with its 90 BPM tempos, played at cool hangouts like the Mezzanine de l'Alcazar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Buddha Bar or the Costes hotel, all of which have brought out compilations in their own names. Although the movement wasn't quite a musical revolution, radio programmers took advantage of it to soften their playlists, and lounge invaded the bars and restaurants of Paris (soon to be replaced by Deep House, which was then languishing in a very deep basement indeed).

It was in this context that the VIP Room discos, led by Jean Roch, commissioned Jean-Michel Jarre to produce this album of lounge music, which originally ran to only 2,000 CDs, and which is a part of the salvo of re-releases that the star French publisher is putting out in 2018. For this stylistic exercise, Jarre gives us a 40-minute demonstration of his mastery of the genre's codes – something he's not always managed to do with other styles – and offers up eight tracks of sensuality (an aspect emphasised by the title and the sleeve image of the pixellated pubis of his then-girlfriend, Isabelle Adjani), with Geometry of Love pt 1 as the climax, and some mystical moments (the Minimoog on Soul Intrusion), and others that approach ambient (Skin Paradox). While the record only offers a patchy discography of Jarre, it is nonetheless of great interest for his hardest-core fans, and it is a worthy testament to a certain era. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz